I’m not disappointed, just mad
It hurts when something you have gotten used to gets taken from you, without notice. I wrote about it yesterday, when Medium killed the editor feature in the iPhone app. And today it happened again, when my newspaper De Volkskrant made a change in their subscriptions, causing me to lose access to a big part of their content. And again, I wasn’t informed up front. I found out because all of a sudden, I couldn’t access a part of their app.
De Volkskrant is one of the largest newspapers in The Netherlands. It also appears in print, but I have a digital-only subscription. It’s the cheapest way to read their content, but for me also the easiest way. Why kill trees and have a pile of paper delivered to my house every day, if I can read it from my phone? This morning I wanted to check out the digital edition of the paper, as I do every morning — only to encounter a screen that said I don’t have access to it with my subscription. Don’t have access? What the hell?
Turns out, after talking to a service rep via Twitter, that they changed their subscriptions. Customers like me, with a ‘Digital Basic’ subscription, now can’t access the full digital edition of the newspaper anymore, only their online articles (don’t ask me about the difference, I don’t quite get it myself).
When Medium killed a feature I used all the time, I was disappointed. I’m not a paying customer. I use their app for free, so I guess when they change something I just have to suck it up.
But with De Volkskrant I am a paying customer. And I feel screwed over. Not just because they didn’t inform me up front about this change. Also not just because of the fact that if I want to have full access again, I have to pay more than double the cost of my current subscription. No, what really maddens me, is the reason why I can’t access the digital newspaper anymore. This is what they told me: apparently they had always wanted to exclude customers with the basic digital subscription from reading the full digital newspaper, but that wasn’t technically possible — until now.
Seriously, that was their official explanation: when we launched the app, we couldn’t exclude customers like you, but now that we have made that technically possible, we will, sorry. Wow, great way to make me feel like a valued customer, Volkskrant. You went from Minimum Viable Product to Maximum Offensive Product.
Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something again: skip the news. That might not be such a bad idea.